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[JEMC]

haxxiy said:

JEMC said:

Tuesday news, part two:

Baldur's Gate 3 has '17,000' variations on its ending, a number that gives me a headache just thinking about it
https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-has-17000-variations-on-its-ending-a-number-that-gives-me-a-headache-just-thinking-about-it/
Baldur's Gate 3 is reported to have a massive amount of endings, according to a conversation Fextralife had with Chrystal Ding, associate writing lead at Larian Studios: "I asked her, how many variations on the ending are there?"
The answer is 17,000, which is a big number. It's one that joins other such huge promises from Larian: 174 hours of cinematics! 22 subclasses! A newspaper that responds to your choices! They're definitely stoking up the furnace on Baldur's Gate 3's pre-release hype, though I feel a little tempering of expectations is in order here.

That's probably endings made up of small cutscenes depending on your choices, which is par for the genre.

If it's the sum of binary permutations you need only 28 of these (2^14 = 16,384 endings, plus a few extra endings missing some content in case you didn't even get to know about the quests leading to them).

Of course, going away from a binominal coefficient complicates the maths a lot but you get the idea.

The article itself especulates about that:

"17,000 endings doesn't mean 17,000 radically different experiences. What's more likely is that your choices will factor into an end-game epilogue of some description, similar to the one we got at the end of Divinity Original Sin 2.

Time for some speculation: let's say there's 10 lines of dialogue with 2 variations each that can present in Baldur's Gate 3's ending—the ways in which you can arrange those lines would add up extremely quickly. They'd each technically create a bespoke cinematic, even if they weren't that unique from a player's standpoint."

It's the most sensible approach, because any other options would be too complicated and involve way too much work.